I don’t watch much tv now, but I used to be on it 8 hours a day, from 3pm, when I got home from school, to 12am, SNL, Jay Leno, David Lettermen time, with Ricki, Maury, Donahue, Jerry, and Oprah keeping me company while the day turned to grey. After I left home for college, I stopped the tv habit. Life had more in store.

But I still have some ways and means leftover from back then. 4 the past few days, I’ve been opening up the New York Times like, “there’s nothing good on.” Iraq, economy, no one taking responsibility, presidential primaries, a distant people tryna get free, sports leagues, elite gadgetry, institutions and people guilty and not guilty. I’m not feelin it. None of it. Fuck the whole thing.

Damn, that sounds so American.

But Indian-American is what I be. Educated and in my body. Questioning underneath the answers fed to me. Searching for something uncomfortable in the addictive comforts tv/i.v. fed to me.

I can’t even lie. I will be using my lil rebate real pretty. Have you heard about it? At least $300 back to you clean, so long as you file your 1040/ez and you as an individual made above $3,000 and under $75, 000. Now I know you know about it.

But, what I wonder is, have you wondered about it?

Class Truths and Lies: All in the (Desi) Family

I grew up in a pukka Desi family. Class was at once a rigid and fluid thing. My mom is Brahmin, father Rajput. Their marriage was like an interracial marriage in America circa 1955. The rigidity of class seeped out of their renegade wedding pictures, no family in the room around the fire, thick frames on beehived faces, only fellow students from their graduate program their to bear witness to that seven times around the earth, wind, and fire, supreme ceremonial rites of passage.

The fluidity of class flew in a spray of salty wave as my parents went from stand clear, head first and only ones in their generation to immigrate, to graduate student housing and government cheese, to their first home and garden in their early 30’s, to three cars, to dissolve scene, atrophy dream, coping mechanisms broke and overused like fossil fuel.

It’s like they used all their life energy just to get here, and the momentum lasted them from 30 to 50, but now that their 60 its like their 80, and I wonder if they’ll be here when I have my first baby. Physically here, I mean. Mentally they are already heaven meet hell, free.

As the only girl child, I was brought up to think that we were struggling for money. But somehow, my older brother always had the impression that we were rich. At least that’s what it seemed like as he asked for and received a mahogany baby grand, a BMW motorcycle, expensive music schools and lessons, a truck. I took that truck though. Drove the shit out of it too.

Many people, and I, at the very least, have experienced class as a multi-layered affair. Changing in the aging of our families. Hierarchical internally, resulting in various economic class positions within the home itself. Education added in as a floating variable, we go working class to rich in small talk rooms when they ask you where you went to school. Class is always an intersection.

No money, the country is broke, but as the sun sets one of our most blatant dynasties, there is a prize, a lottery win without the red tape debt addiction ties, at least 300 bones, a night at the bar if you buy drinks for your friends. A pair of shoes. Three months of subway rides. 45 days in a beautiful hotel in McLeod Ganj, set against the Himalayas, a type writer tapping in the distance, mist over monkeys you watch because they watch you, it is too, blood money.

And I know we deserve it, I’m not hating, thought you knew.

I’m just telling, giving free what’s true.

Back in the day people from India to America used to protest by not paying taxes unfairly laid on them by oppressive governments. Which makes sense, cause it’s not always we have and hold something they want.

What is there to protest? How about the awkward reality that we pay taxes in an every man for himself system. Forget a flat tax, or a proportional tax, here, now, poor generally pay proportionally more than rich. Just because rich can hire an advocate, a genie in a bottle, a fourth wish. It’s just like the criminal justice system. In the modern day, American form of capitalism, these basic state functions become unnecessarily abrasive to the working class.

Why should these basic state functions lubricate the stability of the wealthy and drag fingers on chalkboard down the spines of the poor and working people?

Why is justice tied to money?

Why are tax burdens less burdensome for the wealthy?

When did capitalism equal democracy?

When life could be so sweet, spring buds on trees?

White swan looks my way through the breeze?

West Indian food steeped in Flatbush Avenue grease?

Water necklace on a Oshun throat of honey?

Why is justice tied to money?

What aint the news teaching me?

*

Stay tuned for more and more, from your favorite political poet with All the News That’s Fit to Flip, NaXaL.

So I go back to Oakland, CA, where I once lived, and dropped by my old apartment building, to see who I could see. My boy Erick is at work, but he left me a key under the mat. Gloria, the nice and nosy building manager is home, I ring her bell, she says what she always says when she open the door and its me, her voice high and weathered, a warm cackle, “I always know its you because I look through the door window and I can never see who it is, I can never see you!”

That’s because I still ring her doorbell like how I used to when I lived next door to her, ring, then get my lean on the stucco wall between our doors, waiting patiently. I do it the same way now because I love knowing that there’s this apartment building on a little slope in Oakland, where a white woman in her 60’s is going to greet me how she always greets me.

I ring her bell and move out her field of vision now just because its such a gift to have pushed down roots on Montecito Ave, just up from the gum splattered 7-11, which is just across from the new Whole Foods, my old apartment building where I organized a traveling Christmas party and told all the tenants a heartwarming holiday tale from off the dome, that building is less than one block away from the most perfect cherry tree, its blooming right now in hushed violets and lip parting pinks, a vision of spring, and all you have to do it cross the street to get to Children’s Fairyland, where parents clasp hands with children, little ones leaping and chirping like birds, this is Lake Merritt, where trees cry sap down wood tongues back to me, I came back to see, how home one of my homes can still be.

I walk into Gloria’s spot, she hands me a sherry and we start talking about Obama’s state of race in the nation speech. She was taken. I was listening.

You can do it, I know you can. Another deep and yet not deep enough day in the news. Keep reading for today’s Hip Hop based commentary on the New York Times headlines by Political Poet Naxal. That’s me. I flips the news like you never seen. Enjoy.

Short Riffs: Headlines Remixed

Note: The following poems are found art, based on gleaning words from April 30, 2007, Section A headlines and Ad banners, which are news in their own way (ie. because they paid).